Terms and conditions of business

Please read these Terms and Conditions. They provide clarification for us both in the unlikely event of a dispute arising. If you wish to hire me to write for you, I’ll ask you to confirm that you’ve read and agree to them by clicking the ‘I agree’ button at the foot of this page. Doing this will constitute the establishment of a contract between you and my company, Big Lessons Limited.

Throughout these Terms and Conditions, ‘You’ means you, the person agreeing the Terms and Conditions, and any company on behalf of which you claim authorisation to act. ‘We’, ‘Me’ ‘I’ and ‘Us’ all refer to my company, ‘Big Lessons Limited’.

When you contract with us to write for you, you acknowledge that as the formulation of the contract between us, these Terms and Conditions take precedence over any other terms and conditions, express or implied, and regardless of whether it is your normal practice to conduct similar engagements under your own Terms and Conditions.

If you hire me, Laurence Blume, to write for you, you are contracting with Big Lessons Limited, a UK private Limited Company which trades as ‘freelancecopywriter.co.uk’.

2) Confirming our contract and starting the job

A job is considered as being contracted when you agree these Terms and Conditions by clicking the ‘I agree’ button at the bottom of this page.

If, for any reason, we do not ask you to do this or you decline to do this, a job may be judged to have been contracted on receipt of any email in which you clearly indicate that you wish us to proceed with the work at a fee you have agreed with us in earlier correspondence. If you are contracting with us on behalf of any group of individuals other than yourself alone, or on behalf of a company, you warrant that you are authorised to enter into a contract on behalf of that group of individuals or company.

If you are contracting on behalf of a company which uses a Purchase Order system, the job will be deemed to be contracted only on receipt by email or post of a PO number. The PO itself should be supplied by email or post, but the job will be deemed to have been contracted as soon as your PO number is received.

3) Contracting with us if you work for a marketing services or web development agency

If you contract with us on behalf of a marketing services or web development agency of any kind, to work on a project for one of your clients, a contract will exist only between us and the marketing services agency, and not between us and any client of the marketing services agency.

You agree to indemnify us against any claim by any client of the marketing services agency for compensation or damages brought about as a direct or indirect consequence of the use, or inability or unwillingness to use, the material which we write for you.

If you contract with us on behalf of a marketing services or web development agency of any kind, you attest that you are authorised to enter into a contract on behalf of that marketing services or web development agency.

4) Us contracting directly with one of your clients

If you represent a marketing services or web development agency of any kind, and wish us to work on a project for one of your clients but wish us to contract directly with that client, then a contract, subject to agreement, will exist between your client company and Big Lessons Ltd, and you acknowledge that we are free to conduct and further develop a direct relationship with that client without reference to you, and without compensation or commission of any kind being payable. In such a case, we agree that we will not seek to sell to your client services, other than copywriting, which they have at any time previously purchased from you.

5) The work we do for the fee we agree

Our standard pricing model is intended to be one of ‘locked pricing’. This means that once we’ve agreed the fee, we aim to support the copy until you are entirely happy with it, without any further fee being due. This includes rewriting from scratch after you have viewed the initial draft, if you feel that that is what you’d like us to do, and are able to present a reasonable case for this being necessary.

In order to avoid the possibility of this policy being abused, the service of which you are contractually assured for the fee we agree is defined as and limited to: preparation of first draft; submission of first draft; integration of your feedback to allow preparation of second draft; submission of second draft.

6) Our Guarantee

Our aim is to do you a great job, for the fee that we agree, and to send you away so happy that you come back again. In any creative process, however, there can be misunderstandings. If, when you see a draft, you are dissatisfied with the work that we have written for you, please discuss it with us and we will do everything that we can to resolve your concerns. In the end, if you have given us proper opportunity to address your concerns (defined as working in genuine collaboration with us through at least 3 additional draft submissions after you inform us in writing of your dissatisfaction), and still consider that we have failed to deliver work which is suitable for your purpose when measured against the requirements of your brief, you will be free to terminate our contract with no payment whatsoever being due. If you have made part payment in advance, this will be reimbursed to you. This is entirely without prejudice, and no liability or admission of failure or inability to complete the contract on our part is implied.

In such circumstance, you undertake to make no use whatsoever of any material contained in any draft which we have prepared for you.

In such circumstance, you agree to absolve us of all responsibility for any loss of income or for any costs or damages suffered by you or by any third party as a result of any delay which has been caused to your business or to the business of any third party.

7) Payment terms

7.1 Our standard trading terms are that we will invoice on or after the date on which we actually commence work on the project, and payment will fall due at 30 days unless we have expressly agreed otherwise in writing.

7.2 If the entity to be invoiced is not a UK Limited Company we may, at our discretion, ask you to pay some or all of the project fee in advance of commencement of the work. In this circumstance, any balance of fee will be invoiced on commencement and fall due at 30 days.

(Please do not take offence should we make this request. Pursuing payment of relatively modest sums across borders, should we have to, is impractical. In the case of UK resident private individuals/sole traders, we treat each case on its own merits. A request for some advance payment should in no way be interpreted as an indication of distrust, but is simply a limiting of our credit risk exposure.)

7.3 You will make payment by cheque, BACS or other recognised bank transfer, to the address or account shown on the invoice. If you are making electronic payment and your accounts department require any information additional to that shown on your invoice, they must request this information from us in sufficient time to complete payment by the appropriat edate. If you wish to make payment by Visa or Mastercard, or by PayPal, we can arrange for you to do this securely, and you must advise us of this in sufficient time for payment to be completed by the due date.

7.4 The existence of an ‘end of following month’ payment practice in your company’s handling of accounts payable will in no way alter your obligation to make payment on the due date shown on our invoice.

7.5 Once a project is contracted as described above, the fee we have agreed between us for the full project is deemed to be incurred unless we have specifically agreed payment milestones. You have no right to withhold or reduce payment based on your critical response to, or appraisal of, the copy we write for you, and you acknowledge our right to pursue payment in full should you elect for any reason to do this.

7.6 Should you for any reason fail to maintain communication with us with regard to a project which you have contracted, we will issue an invoice forthwith, and due for immediate payment. We will consider failure to maintain communication as a period of 21 days in which we do not hear from you, despite our sending 3 or more emails to an address via which we have previously communicated successfully with you and from which the mail does not bounce. 5 days will be allowed for the last email to be responded to. In such a situation, we will make every effort to contact you by telephone as well as by email, but it is your obligation to ensure you maintain communication throughout your project.

7.7 In the event of premature commutation of the project by you for any reason, no reduction in fee will be due, and the full sum agreed between us for the work contracted will immediately become due for payment, with the immediate cancellation of any period of credit shown on the invoice.

7.8 This does not affect your statutory rights, nor your rights under the terms of my Guarantee (6, above) which protects you in the situation where, after a fair and proper process of collaboration, you feel that the copy I have delivered is not fit for purpose.

8) Late Payment

We are a signatory to the UK Government’s Pay On Time Code, administered by The Credit Protection Association. Where payment is not received within 5 working days of the due date shown on the invoice, we reserve the right to charge interest. This will be applied in line with the ‘Pay On Time’ guidelines of 8% plus the prevailing Bank of England reference rate. The current Bank of England reference rate for the period 1st July 2018 until 31 Dec 2018 is 0.50%, making a total interest rate chargeable of 8.50%. Under the Terms of the guidelines and associated legislation, a compensation payment may also be due. You can click here to verify the Pay On Time guidelines and rates.

9) Jurisdiction

In the settlement of any and all disputes arising out of these Terms and Conditions or arising in any other way from any contract formed between us, you acknowledge that Jurisdiction in the Courts of England and Wales will prevail and agree to subject yourself to and comply with settlement ordered under by the Courts of England and Wales.

10) Delivery dates

We try hard to ensure that deadlines and milestones are met punctually, and almost always manage this. From time to time, however, workload may cause us to need to put back delivery dates a little. Where this is necessary, we will always seek to agree this with you first. We reserve the right, however, to put back any milestone or delivery date by up to 48 hours, providing that we have given you notice of this at least 24 hours before the date originally agreed.

11) Security

If you pass data, information or materials of any kind to us as part of a project which you wish us to undertake for you, or for a company who are your client, we will be happy to sign any NDA you wish to present in good faith, but you indemnify us against any action whatsoever by you or your client, associated with the accidental disclosure or loss of this information.

12) Passing over of your own copy draft

As part of the brief for your project, you may ask us to view a copy draft which you have written yourself, or which has been written for you by somebody else. If you send us such draft copy, you affirm that you are the copyright holder, or that you are authorised by the copyright holder to permit all or part of this material to form a part of the new copyright work which we will create for you. In such a case you indemnify us against any claim arising from subsequent suggestion that the new work in any way breaches any existing copyright.

In any situation where you do ask us to view an existing copy draft as part of the briefing, you acknowledge that the draft which we will write for you may bear similarities in all or part to this draft, but that in such a case the draft we write for you will be considered as an original work under the terms of our contract, without regard for the existence of the original draft.

13) Referencing other people’s content

If you send us research or sample copy taken from someone else’s printed collateral or site as an indication of what you want, we will make every effort to ensure that the draft that we prepare for you in no way breaches the copyright of the content owner. However, you indemnify us against any action arising, directly or indirectly, as a result of use of this content as reference material.

14) Your right to use the copy we write for you

When you commission us to write copy for you, you are purchasing the copyright in the work we write for you, and this is assigned to you on receipt by us of full and final payment of all fees due.

We reserve the right to use reasonable extracts of the copy in the promotion of FreelanceCopywriter.co.uk.

15) Errors and literals

We make every effort to ensure that copy is free of spelling mistakes and other literals. Early drafts may sometimes contain such errors, and our practice is to ensure that these are removed before a final draft is submitted to you. However, the responsibility for checking for spelling mistakes and literals is yours, and you absolve us of responsibility for any costs incurred as a result of the appearance of such errors in the final published form of any collateral in which you use the copy concerned, whether or not these errors appeared in any draft of the copy supplied by us.

16) Copy samples on this site

You acknowledge that all sample copy displayed on this site is copyright the commissioning company or Big Lessons Limited, and is displayed for your information only. You may not copy or adapt any item, in whole or part, for any use whatsoever, save in a presentation whose purpose is to demonstrate to a client or colleague the nature of our work, with a view to gaining approval to commission us.

17) Our collaboration with other copywriters

When you contract with us to write copy for you, you acknowledge that we may, from time to time, engage the services of other competent professional copywriters to help us deliver all or part of the work which you require. In such a case, we undertake to review and amend the work before it is presented to you, and to ensure that the work is of the quality and professionalism you would expect had we written it in its entirety.

Terms and Conditions

I confirm that I am contracting the project we have discussed on the terms agreed in our correspondence, and that I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions displayed at http://www.freelancecopywriter.co.uk/terms-and-conditions-of-business/.

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